really has me stumped!
 

hi, i recently installed mandrake 9.1 on a seperate hardrive than than the one that currently has windows xp. Everything installed well and lilo worked fine (except for the fact windows wasnt an option.. hehe) but i had to remove the HD with mandrake so i could use it for another computer of mine. now whenever i go to start up before the windows loading screen comes up i get about half a screen full of "99 99 99 99's" is there a way to get rid of this somehow?

Did you try starting up with a windows boot disk? See if that will at least start your windows os. Also there is a command to fix the mbr so that it will use windows as your os loader and load that baby on up. I believe the command to type with the prompt is fdisk /mbr or fixdisk /mbr. But surely someone will come here to correct me. It's different for windows os's other than xp and then with xp. So hopefully I at least got one of them. Basically I just wanted to add my input and see if you tried a boot disk to get windows to load. Good luck. Peace.

xp starts
 

well xp starts but things are acting strange ever since the bootloader was installed i can boot xp but its just bizzarr that all those 9's are showing up.. is there a reason for them?

u can save ur MBR and restore it later by using Ultimate Boot Disk creator(UBD)it consists of set of tools.

sounds like lilo went for a crap which it often tends to do, i would suggest using grub instead.